Women's rights activists are setting their sights on the 'Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery' as a means of holding Japan accountable for its wartime sexual abuses and of restoring honour to women victims.

"We should learn from our mistakes. The Tokyo tribunal needs to be reviewed again from a gender perspective. It did not give justice to the women and men colonised by Japan. Why were crimes against women such as mass rape and military sex slavery unpunished, despite the extensive evidence submitted?" Japanese rights activist Yayori Matsui said in an interview with TerraViva.

"The Tribunal's judges were all men and did not understand sexual violence against women. The survivors were silenced and no victims were allowed to participate," she explained.

The proposed tribunal represents an effort to seek other venues for justice for women victims of war crimes, given what rights campaigners say is the common failure legal institutions to address violence against women in war.

Justice for women victims was inadequately meted out by war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and provisions in the draft statute for an International Criminal Court (ICC) are not yet in the bag.

And while the ICC treaty is to be completed this month, "it will take a few years before the Court actually begins to function, and it will not deal with war crimes of the past," said a statement by campaigners on the women's war crimes tribunal. Efforts to seek legal justice for 'comfort women', who were forced into sexual slavery for solders of the Japanese imperial army, have not been successful. "This being the case, there is no time to lose, as the women victims are ageing and drying," added the statement.

Matsui said the tribunal is being planned for around Dec 8, 2000 in order to be held close to Human Rights Day, Dec 10, and on the day marking the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbour, which triggered the start of the Pacific War. Groups of former 'comfort women' have supported plans for the tribunal, saying their dignity could be restored only by the identification of perpetrators and their punishment.

Matsui said the tribunal would help right a historical wrong. "The colonial legacy saw to it that Asian women in colonised countries were not treated as human beings," she added. 

The plight of 'comfort women', hundreds of thousands of women taken as sex slaves by the Japanese from the Philippines, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Vietnam and South-east Asia was now well-known, Matsui added.  Girls as young as 15 were taken, submitted to sexual violence, frequently for a prolonged period and abandoned or murdered as the imperial army retreated.

Matsui told of the harrowing case of two Chinese fifteen-year-old girls taken from the same village and raped by 20 to men per day. The mother of one hanged herself after pleading unsuccessfully with the military to release her daughter. Matsui said Asian 'comfort women', apart from bearing psychological and physical wounds from the war, continue to silently bear, without redress, the ostracism and shame as wartime sex slaves. "Only in one case, in Indonesia, was a Japanese soldier brought to trial for sexually abusing a woman in Asia - and she was Dutch," she noted. "Sexual violence is so painful for the victims. But at last they are beginning to speak up. This is progress," she stressed, recounting how South Korean former 'comfort women' spoke out in 1990.

Matsui said former 'comfort women' have made six demands to the Japanese government: a request for the truth about 'comfort women' to be revealed; a request for an official apology; state compensation for individuals victims; prosecution of the perpetrators; a description of comfort women in school history books and their commemoration by memorial halls and events. "None of these demands has been met to date by the Japanese authorities; they accept moral but not legal responsibility and say the issue was dealt with in bilateral agreement during the 1960s," said Matsui.

The Japanese government has expressed remorse on the 'comfort women' issue and rejects reparations, but has put up a much-criticised 'private fund' for women funded by donations. Matsui continued: "The prosecution of individual perpetrators has never been taken up: the taboo of the Emperor and attacks on the comfort women from Japan's resurgent right-wing have made this hazardous."

Matsui hopes the ICC would in the future treat abuses against women in conflict a war crime. "If the problem of perpetrators is solved at the ICC, and it becomes a model for a women-friendly court, this will be a kind of precedent for other cases of women caught in armed conflict," she said.

Alison Dickens